Rain, Wind & The Lake!!

I guess the weather is definitely in charge lately. In a matter of 10 days we've gone from warm and sunny to fourteen inches of heavy and wet snow to our latest visitor from Mother Nature. This first picture is a view down the road in front of our house. As you can see, the tree that we have talked about getting cut down (because we cannot see coming out of the driveway) is being taken care of by Mother Nature. See my earlier blog for pictures of this same tree with broken branches from the winter storm last week. I started out my day by driving down the road and seeing a small river across the end of my road that had a couple of cars sitting in it. I was amazed at how flooded the intersection was. They were in the midst of closing it down so of course I turned around. After getting to the intersection at the other end of the road, I was stopped and they were going to shut the whole road down. I called Danny (who had already left for work) and suggested that he might want to work from home because I wasn't sure if we'd be able to get back home later. These are the only two ways to my house. Meanwhile, I went to work and planned on seeing how the morning went. Danny went home and called to tell me about the branch when he got home. Here is some of the damage from that branch:
















That would be our fence and pool shed. As you can see, this is a really big branch. It slammed down across our septic system and tore through the fence and completely shifted the shed, busting open the door and breaking a window. We are not sure about the equipment inside yet. Our snow blower, lawn mower, pool equipment and lawn furniture are in there so I guess once we can get in there to see, we'll know what we're up against. Meanwhile..........yes there's more.......Danny took the dogs out down through the basement and things looked dry. Less than 30 minutes later, there was water pouring into the (finished!) basement. We have a lot of unpacked stuff down there like pictures and of course my prized dining room set! I came home after sneaking through some barriers to get here. Dana came over and brought his sump pump for us to use. This brother of mine.....ya gotta love him. He's always there when we need him. We used a squeegee (sp?) and a push broom along with the sump pump and worked on getting the water out. This pumps 30 gallons of water per minute and it ran for about 90 minutes.....that's equal to about 2700 gallons of water out of our basement! Boy, am I glad that I suggested Danny work from home. My dogs were crated in the basement. For those of you who know me....that would not have been a good situation for me to walk into! We had to take everything out of the basement and move it to the garage.....so much for me unpacking.....I'm throwing a lot of it out! My family pictures were okay and the dining room set didn't fair too badly. Some of the other furniture got wet but I'm not overly worried about that. Here are some pictures of what we have always wanted.....a lake in our backyard.....well.....not one that threatens our home but I guess this is the next best thing:













































Danny and I were just talking yesterday about how lucky we are to have come out of the last six months and have landed on our feet so well.
So....do we still feel lucky? Yes, we really do. We are lucky that we were able to come home. We are lucky that the dogs didn't get too stressed out. We are lucky that we didn't lose anything significant. We are lucky that the tree didn't land on the house. We are soooo lucky to have such an awesome and supportive family who are always there when you need them most. We are so lucky that our kids are all home safe and sound and nobody got hurt. And....we are lucky that we have insurance. :-)